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Obama’s Gay Marriage Support Shocks Black Church

By Anthea Butler

…ommunity opposed it. Take Rev. William Barber, head of the North Carolina NAACP, who preached a powerful message against Amendment 1, equating Americans’ use of the Bible to oppose same-sex marriage today with the defense of slavery and militarism in the past eras. Kristin Rawls, a writer and activist, notes that the efforts against Amendment 1 in North Carolina crossed racial and religious lines, with organizations coming together under an umbrel…

Growing Up Gay in 666: Fred Phelps in Retrospect

By Scott Blaine Swenson

Growing up in Topeka, Kansas, wasn’t exactly Hell—not for me anyway. Then again, I spent most of those 18 formative years hiding from Topeka’s foremost biblical authority, the infamous anti-gay funeral picketer, Reverend Fred Phelps. As a child I had a secret buried deep within and was convinced if what Rev. Phelps said was true—that “God Hates Fags”—then I must be the Antichrist. The fact that the US Postal Service assigned “666” as Topeka’s zip…

Religious Leaders On Anti-Muslim Frenzy: “Silence Is Not An Option”

By Sarah Posner

…anxious and fearful that their classmates “will look at them like aliens.” A number of religious leaders, including Mattson, spoke at the press briefing, which was one of the most highly attended press events relating to religion that I’ve seen — except for events hosted by religious right groups. Richard Cizik, president of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, speaking to evangelical Christians engaging in or promoting anti-Muslim…

Elaine Howard Ecklund Wants to Dispel Myths Surrounding Religious Resistance to Science

By Sammy Feldblum

…y called “non-overlapping magisteria”—come into contact. As useful as the data can often be, Ecklund’s interpretations and prescriptions often strain to “depoliticize” the sites of conflict, as if it’s even possible to depoliticize an issue like climate science in the United States. Her reasons are numerous, no doubt, but the factors that distort public discussion, money and power, are the kinds of forces that can warp research of this kind. If on…

Conservative Hardliners at Synod Prompt Question: “What Are We Doing Here?”

By Patricia Miller

…ed as having “positive values”: “There is no basis for comparing or making analogies, even remotely, between homosexual unions and God’s plan for matrimony and the family.” As John Allen reports in Crux, Erdő’s remarks prompted Italian Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli to ask “what are we doing here?” if any changes in even pastoral practice were off the table. What are the bishops doing there indeed? As Ross Douthat observed in the New York Times, t…

Exclusion is Causing Great Harm: A Conversation With Suspended UMC Pastor Rev. Cynthia Meyer

By Joel Pitney

…hurch leadership with open arms. In fact, within days charges were brought against her for violating the UMC’s official policy against openly gay individuals practicing as clergy. Despite the fact that her own congregation accepted her choices, the Bishop of The Great Plains Conference where she serves ruled to suspend her for a minimum of two years. As a result she is now faced with a difficult decision: wait out the suspension in hopes of being…

Islamic Intellectual Leadership at a Crossroads

By Amina Wadud

…es of operation, and even the projects they put their energies into. In US academia recently, women scholars had a list discussion about the merits of activism vis-à-vis the promotion process for most US academies. If you play too much of a role in the day-to-day lives of Muslims at every level—but especially where the majority abide, which is rank and file—then your credentials as an intellectual are questionable. For women, that is. For men ther…

For Conservatives, the Future Looks Dim… and Gay

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…o homosexuality, that it conflicts with religious beliefs, or that it goes against the Bible.” But those “moral objections” seem to be of less concern to a growing number of Americans: Just under half of Americans (45%) say they think engaging in homosexual behavior is a sin, while an equal number says it is not. Those who believe homosexual behavior is a sin overwhelmingly oppose gay marriage. Similarly, those who say they personally feel there i…

Mormonism’s “9/11 Mosque Moment”

By Joanna Brooks

…tural disasters, I’m getting at this point only an eerie silence on flood-ravaged Pakistan, which is 98% Muslim. To make matters worse, a local Southern California LDS Church representative who had pledged to join seventy other religious leaders at Friday’s interfaith press conference against Islamaphobia failed to show. Certainly we can do better. Whatever one thinks of the Park51 Islamic community center (and the project is not without pro…

The Messiah is Not Coming

By Peter Laarman

…ntion of the work-hard-and-be-rewarded economy as “a thing that is passing away” got me to thinking of all of the other things that are passing away. Allow me to catalog them: 1. related to the preacher’s point, a large and stable middle class flanked by much smaller lower and upper classes: we are morphing rapidly into a society of elites and drones without a middle that isn’t being perpetually downsized and drone-ized in both subtle and unsubtle…